Dated ‘Missolonghi, Jan. 22, 1824’, ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’ is a poem Lord Byron wrote on his 36th birthday, less than three months before he died. Byron was at Missolonghi, in Greece, fighting with the Greeks in their war for independence. It’s one of Byron’s most […]
‘Expostulation and Reply’ is the ideal poem for a schoolchild to throw back at their teacher, when that teacher accuses them of being idle or not ‘doing anything’ simply because they’re not reading books at that moment.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses Wordsworth’s famous line about poetry and ‘spontaneous overflow’ 1798 was the key year for Romantic poetry in Britain, for it saw the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by the two brightest new stars in […]